Understanding the inputs

ExoRad supports a bunch of file formats and more can be added if necessary. Here are reported the main input files.

Payload

To build the instrument ExoRad needs a payload description file. This is an xml file divided in separated section. An example for this file is reported in exorad/example/payload_example.xml.

The whole content must be encapsulated between

<root>
</root>

The first two entries are the configuration path. This is the path where all the payload description data are located. Using the _ConfigPath_ entry will help you to keep shorter the data file name in the following part of the description file, as _ConfigPath_path_to_file.

<ConfigPath> payload/description/directory/path/
    <comment>Main directory for the configuration files</comment>
</ConfigPath>

Then the file must contain a common section to include information useful for the simulation but not strictly related to one of the channels. This section must be encapsulated between

<common>
</common>

Inside this section you have to put information to build things such as the source, the foregrounds, or you can add custom noise that you want to add to the simulation. Each of this option will be described in a dedicated section. Here must also place the wavelength range we want to simulate, as example:

<common>
    <wl_min unit="micron">0.45</wl_min>
    <wl_max unit="micron">2.2</wl_max>
</common>

After the common section you will have an optics section, that will contain all the information about the common optics. Then you can start listing the channel description.

Target

The target list file is a simple csv file containing a list of target stars described by

column name	description
star name	name of the target to observe
star M [M_sun]	target mass in solar masses
star Teff [K]	target temperature in Kelvin
star R [R_sun]	target radius in solar radii
star D [pc]	target distance in parsec
star magk	target magnitude in K band